Thursday – Friday – Travel Days!

Thursday morning it was time for us to head out! Our guide met us in the lobby of our hotel at 9:00 AM to help us get to the train station – our first step in our journey toward home! We had a lot of luggage, so our guide helped us to hire someone to get our largest suitcases onto the train for us, all for less than $10 – definitely worth it when you’re negotiating the train station in a foreign country with 2 kids, a stroller, 5 suitcases, and an assortment of backpacks, diaper bags, and purses!

The train ride from Guangzhou to Hong Kong went smoothly, though it’s always a little emotional for me to be leaving the country of my children’s birth. Last time around, I knew that – barring catastrophe or direct instruction otherwise from God – we’d be back to adopt again. This time I don’t think we will be. In fact, Matt is quite certain we will not. I think we’ll be back to visit, maybe someday even for an extended period of time if we can make it work, but we think our family is probably complete at six – and so, I don’t know when we’ll be back to this place that has blessed our family so immensely. I know that in the next few weeks, FangFang is going to begin to lose her Mandarin. She’s going to become more and more at home in American culture and less and less part of Chinese culture. There is both loss and beauty in that, and it always strikes me in particular as we leave China to head home.

Once we arrived in Hong Kong, we waited in line for taxis to take us to the airport – due to our large amount of luggage, we needed to split up into 2 separate taxis. Any time we had to split up was a little nerve-wracking, since we didn’t have the same ability to communicate with each other by phone as we would in the States, but it all went just fine. We met up at the airport and got ourselves and our luggage checked in. The customs and security checkpoints there were pretty intense, so we were glad we’d given ourselves hours of extra time at the airport. We’d thought we’d be sitting around for a few hours just killing time, but by the time we had gone through all the lines we needed to do, it was about 4:00, so we finally started looking for a restaurant at which we could eat a very late lunch! Then we collected our things, bought some bottled water, and headed over to our gate.

Unfortunately, there was yet another security checkpoint as we boarded the plane, and they wouldn’t let us take any of our bottled water with us – frustrating!

We ended up arranging ourselves differently than I ever would have predicted ahead of time – we had a row of 3 seats from window to aisle and then, in the row behind, the middle and aisle seats. On every train ride we’d taken through that time, FangFang had insisted very strongly that she sit with Danny and Sharon, so while I never envisioned my newest child sitting anywhere other than next to me on her first flight, it seemed pointless to make it a point of contention, so we buckled her in between Danny and Sharon, and Madeleine CaiQun and I settled into the row behind them, with the plan that I’d swap with Danny or Sharon for a bit when it was time for FangFang to go to sleep.

This was FangFang’s idea of how best to sit in her airplane seat. She wasn’t sure why we were all so amused.

Mei Mei actually did great with all the travel – mostly due to the provision of a well-stocked iPad for her use 🙂 She also enjoyed the in-flight entertainment options and watched some Hello Kitty and Doc McStuffins shows. Sitting next to her was quite relaxing, and I actually got to do some reading on our travels!

About an hour into our flight, just as the flight attendants were serving dinner, we began to hit some major turbulence – the flight attendants crouched down behind their dinner carts and soon abandoned serving food in favor of buckling themselves into their seats. They did later return to delivering dinner – much to Madeleine CaiQun’s relief. I’d been the last person served before the turbulence hit, and, engrossed in her show, she failed to notice for a few minutes but then, oblivious to her volume, yelled out over the sounds coming from her headphones, “Where’s my food?!?!” But even as the flight attendants began to move around the cabin sporadically, the turbulence remained pretty significant, and the “fasten seat belt” sign was on for four or five hours. I was so nervous – probably my biggest fear prior to traveling was that our plane would crash, and I’d never see the rest of my family again. I knew the probability was small, but still, I worried about it. I spent most of those turbulent hours praying. I certainly wasn’t going to get any sleep.

Finally things settled down. I wasn’t really able to get any sleep, though, before FangFang woke up (she’d just gone to sleep next to Danny and Sharon). And then Danny said he hadn’t slept at all yet, either, and he wanted to switch with me and have me take over with FangFang so he could try to sleep, so I went and sat with her while everyone else slept. She wasn’t thrilled to be with me again, but she calmed down pretty quickly, and I did my best to entertain her in our confined space. And after a few hours, she curled up with her blanket and went to sleep again, and I was able to sleep for a couple hours, too. FangFang certainly did better than I thought she might on the long flight – sometimes kids are just miserable and scream and cry for hours, and we were certainly glad that was not our reality. Mostly it was just long and exhausting, and I just wanted to be home.

We landed in Newark around 9:00 at night and needed to go through customs and security and immigration, and ChenFang became an American citizen! After we collected our luggage, we waited around for our hotel shuttle and finally made it to the hotel around 11:00. Sharon’s parents were there hanging out with my dad, and we all spent a bit of time together before Sharon and Danny headed out with them. I was a bit concerned about how FangFang would do with saying goodbye to them, but, perhaps for the best, we lacked the language facility to communicate that this goodbye was for more than a few hours, so she seemed alright with it.

I got the girls in bed and then got a few hours of sleep myself. I was able to fall asleep just fine, despite the time difference, but FangFang woke me up around 4:30 needing a diaper change, and I was never able to get back to sleep after that, so eventually I got up and showered and started packing up our stuff. I woke the girls, and my dad and I took them down to breakfast, and by 8:00 we were on the shuttle heading back to the airport.

There was a little bit of drama with the seat assignments – the seat Madeleine CaiQun was supposed to sit in was broken – but after working with the gate agent and having a friendly passenger offer to switch her seat with us, we were able to get 3 seats in one row and 1 in the next row, so we were all close together.

It felt great to be finally really heading home! We were, of course, completely exhausted.

But still, we were happy to be close to home. I told my dad I didn’t even want to stop anywhere for lunch – I just wanted to get home – so we got a couple things at the McDonald’s drive-through, and I had some snacks left over from what I’d taken with us to China, and that sustained us until we got home.

Finally around 3:30 PM on Friday, approximately 46.5 hours after we’d left our hotel in Guangzhou, we rolled into our driveway, and I could not have been happier to be home! More details on our reunion and introductions in the next post 🙂

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Meet Alison

I'm Alison, wife to one great guy and mama to four precious kiddos. My days are spent loving and caring for those 5 and anyone else God brings into my path, and as I read books and explain math, wipe noses and change diapers, teach and pray, correct and celebrate, I also contemplate and share my thoughts in this space. I'm so honored that you're here!

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